The Coaching Project

Coaching with CLASS Instructional Support and the Project Approach

by Mid-America Head Start Coaches, Spring 2015

Introduction: The Tree Graph

Preschool children involved in a long-term investigation of trees had been invited by their teacher to survey and tally the trees in their yards at home. The teacher conferred with his Head Start coach about next steps. The two knew that the children had experience with comparing quantities using graphs, and wondered what the children would do if they were challenged to create their own graph based on their tree surveys.

The teacher gathered a core group of six children and got them started by asking how they would represent their trees on the graph. The children jumped right in and started making stacks of circles on a large blank piece of paper. When the teacher asked them to compare the number of trees, the children struggled. The teacher referred the children to their past experiences with graphs to get them thinking about solutions. As the children worked together, they figured out that a line at the bottom of the graph was needed. Using a fresh piece of paper, the children drew circles moving up from the baseline, and wrote their names to identify their own tree counts. The children seemed pleased with their efforts and the teacher acknowledged it was easier to compare the number of trees on the new graph. Then the teacher noticed, “Luke has four trees and Israel has four trees but on our graph, it looks like Israel has more trees.” Israel worked alone and drew a simpler graph with only two stacks of circles, one stack for his four trees and the other for Luke’s four trees. Since he made the circles the same size, he seemed satisfied with the results and told the teacher, “Now they look like the same.”

Inquiry within a Community of Practice

This story of children, teacher, and coach thinking together was shared with a group of coaches at Mid-America Head Start and their community partners from local universities who met monthly to collaborate on their own professional development. The coaching community of practice had been inquiring into strategies for supporting teachers with the sort of teacher-child interactions that are described in the Instructional Support Domain of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) (Pianta, Hamre, & LaParo, 2008) (see graphic below).

Their inquiry evolved into shared work on a research project, and the coaching community spent the first year of the project providing weekly, individualized, classroom-based coaching to teachers. The coaches engaged teachers in side-by-side video analysis of teaching practice using the CLASS Instructional Support Domain as a framework. Teachers were invited to set goals for improving their interactions and coaches provided support toward achieving these goals.

One of the community partners, Dr. Catherine Wilson, had been the roving member of the group, meeting with individual and small groups of coaches, and bringing attention to their important discoveries. Another community partner, Dr. Sue Vartuli, had identified measures, including CLASS scores, and collected pre- and post-test data to evaluate the effectiveness of the coaching.

The Project Approach in the Coaching Project

Although the data from the first year of coaching was promising, with significant improvements in CLASS scores, the coaches felt that more was needed to improve classroom practices. They thought that teacher-child interactions might be further enhanced if they were embedded in a more sustained and integrated set of learning opportunities. Therefore, the coaches turned to the Project Approach as a context for effective instructional interactions. With this decision, a Project Approach Fidelity was created to highlight essential features of the Project Approach, and measure adherence to and meaningful interactions using this curriculum framework.

Lilian Katz, Sylvia Chard, and Judy Harris-Helm are three experts in the field of early childhood education who have written and trained extensively on project-based learning for young children. Helm and Katz (2011) define projects as in-depth investigations of real-world, worth-while topics. They identify the development of intellectual dispositions as the goal of project work. This emphasis on intellectual development seemed to the coaching community of practice to connect well with the focus on higher-order thinking and language development from the CLASS Instructional Support Domain.

Chard (1998) describes three phases of the Project Approach.

Phase 1: Beginning the Project—Teachers discuss the topic with children to find out about their related experiences and prior knowledge. They invite children to represent experiences and demonstrate their current understanding and develop questions to pursue. They also communicate with families about the investigation and ways to engage.
Phase 2: Developing the Project—Children are provided opportunities to investigate the topic by conducting field work, interviewing experts, and accessing resources such as books, websites, and videos. Teachers encourage the young investigators to represent what they are learning in a variety of ways.
Phase 3: Concluding the Project—Teachers arrange for a culminating event and support children in reviewing and evaluating the project. Children represent their new knowledge and help choose appropriate materials for display as they plan for sharing the work with others.

The Mid-America Head Start coaches and their community partners believed that work in each of these phases of the Project Approach would provoke children and teachers to think, talk, and learn together.

Teaching and Learning

When the Project Approach became part of the shared work, and teachers and coaches were learning new ways of being with children, the coaches observed that a beneficial coherence among experiences had been created. Everyone was immersed in the same process of learning.

Children, supported by teachers, investigated real-world topics.
Teachers, supported by coaches, researched engaging learning experiences and interactions with children.
Coaches, supported by community partners, continued to inquire into effective strategies for teacher development. At all levels, communities of learners and practitioners were thinking; figuring it out together.

There were many examples of meaningful interactions and experiences when teachers were coached to facilitate project work. Children investigated real-world topic such as birds in their neighborhood, tools used by workers, shoes and shoe stores, the people in their buildings, musical instruments, elevators, and doors. One teacher engaged a child in a lengthy feedback loop about the creation of a television during a class project on their houses. Before completing the construction, he planned by listing four steps:

1) Paint the box black 2) Draw the screen 3) Draw the buttons, and 4) Make an antennae

Babies

In the first phase of a project on babies, a child reminisced that when she was a baby, you could cover her all up with a blanket. After thinking with her coach, the teacher responded by encouraging the child to share her story with all of the children and engaging them in non-standard measurement with baby blankets. For several days, the children estimated how many blankets were needed to cover babies, preschoolers, and adults as well as objects. They experimented, evaluated their estimations, and recorded their findings.

The Ball Project

When a group of children investigated balls, they had many opportunities to explore, handle play with, and compare all types of balls. With help from a father, they cut balls open to find what was inside. One child decided to create an observational drawing of a soccer ball. His teacher watched as he counted the number of black shapes on the ball and determined that there were twelve shapes. The child then went repeatedly to the Math Center, returning each time with a shape card and comparing it to the twelve black shapes until he identified the black shapes as pentagons. He created his drawing and asked his teacher for support with writing “12” and “Soccer ball.”

Cars

A group of children were studying cars and three of them became particularly interested in wheels. One of their parents brought in a wheel for the children to explore. Together, the three children created a detailed drawing of the wheel. Their teacher asked if there was any other way they could create a wheel, and they constructed one from blocks and manipulative toys. The teacher then asked if their wheel was functional. With very little support from the teacher, the three children worked together to transform their wheel into one that would actually roll.

Read again at: https://info.teachstone.com/blog/examples-of-pairing-instructional-support-and-the-project-approach

In each case, children were at the center of discussing, generating questions, investigating, representing discoveries, and evaluating results. Teachers, coaches, families, and most importantly the children themselves, were coming to understand how capable they were as thinkers.

Research Results

The sense of accomplishment felt by children, families, and educators was reinforced by the observational research results. There were significant pre/post gains on both CLASS scores and Early Childhood Project Approach Fidelity (ECPAF) ratings. Teachers improved interactions and learning opportunities with children on both measures. There was a strong positive relationship between CLASS scores and ECPAF ratings. Higher ECEPAF ratings were found to predict higher CLASS scores.

Vartuli, S., Bolz, C., & Wilson, C. (2014). A learning combination: Coaching with CLASS and the Project Approach. Early Childhood Research and Practice, 16(1 & 2).

Links to Resources

To read further about the 5-year research project on coaching with CLASS Instructional Support and the Project Approach, follow this link to an article in Early Childhood Research & Practice. http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v16n1/vartuli.html

Links to websites and on-line journals related to the Project Approach follow:

The Illinois Projects in Practice website: http://illinoispip.org
Project Approach website founded by Dr. Sylvia Chard: www.projectapproach.org
Website for Best Practices begun by Dr. Judy Harris Helm: www.bestpracticesinc.net
Early Childhood Research & Practice edited by Dr. Lilian G. Katz: http://www.ecrp.uiuc.edu

References:

Chard, S. C. (1998). The project approach: Making curriculum come alive (Book 1). New York: Scholastic, Inc.

Helm, J. H., & Katz, L. (2011). Young investigators: The project approach in the early years. (2^nd Ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.

Pianta, R., LaParo, K., & Hamre, B. (2008). The Classroom assessment scoring system manual pre-k. Brookes: Baltimore, MD.

Author information:

The blog was originally written for a Teachstone, LLC., blog publication. It was authored by the Coaching Community of Practice from Mid-America Head Start led by Carol Bolz for Teachstone,LLC. Education support staff from The Y of Greater Kansas City, Kansas City Public Schools, The Family Conservancy, Independence School District, Operation Breakthrough, St. Mark’s United Inner City Services, Plaza de Niños, and Learn a Lot have been involved in coaching with CLASS Instructional Support Domain and the Project Approach with support from Drs. Catherine Wilson and Sue Vartuli for the past seven years. Contact Carol Bolz from Mid-America Head Start with comments or questions: cbolz@marc.org

Cars

Read again at: https://info.teachstone.com/blog/examples-of-pairing-instructional-support-and-the-project-approach

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